Nearly 5,380 medical appointments were completed at the Hopkinsville VA clinic from Sept. 1 to Feb. 28, and nearly 20 percent of them failed to meet the health system's timeliness goal, which calls for patients to be seen within 30 days, the statistics showed.

That rate was roughly 7 times worse than the national average.

Nor did things improve over time. Fifteen percent of all the clinic's appointments in September involved waits of at least 30 days, the statistics showed. By February, 24.5 percent of appointments resulted in at least monthlong waits.

Meanwhile, nearly 690 of all the September-through-February appointments at the Hopkinsville clinic involved delays lasting 31 days to two months, the review found.

About 339,000 veterans live in Kentucky.

The VA's outpatient clinic in Bowling Green was also among the most delay-plagued in the U.S. Nearly 9 percent of the appointments completed from September through February involved a delay of at least a month.

The VA clinic in Somerset was next, with nearly 6 percent of its appointments taking more than 30 days to complete, followed closely by the VA clinic in Berea, the statistics showed.

At the other end of the spectrum, VA clinics in nine other Kentucky communities had less than 1 percent of all appointments with such delays. Those clinics are in Louisville, Morehead, Hazard, Bellevue, Fort Knox, Owensboro, Florence, Clarkson and Carrollton.

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